Need some advice for chemicalengineering grad school!

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

<p>Hello Everyone!</p>

<p>I will be a sophomore at ASU in the Chemical Engineering Department, and my desired path is academia (PhD then professor). I have a 4.0 after my freshman year in the ChemE program, and I am extremely involved in my college (clubs, student leader positions, TAing), and I am doing my own research in an analytic chemistry lab. I have not had any issues whatsoever with my major, but this is not due to the difficulty of the program, as most people are struggling. This being said, I have utmost confidence in my skill and work ethic to achieve above a 3.9 overall by the end of my undergrad. </p>

<p>I just have some questions about what I should do to have my pick of graduate programs.
Should I stay in my current lab doing interdisciplinary research, or should I stick to a specific Chemical Engineering lab?
Are minors important, or can I just take classes I feel are useful and not worry about taking specific ones for a minor?
While ASU is a good school, I know it is not that prestigious; will getting into a good graduate program be much more difficult? What should I be aiming for to get into schools in the top 10 for interdisciplinary work in ChemE?</p>

<p>If anyone could help or give tips, I would be very grateful.</p>

2

<p>If you do good work, top-tier schools will accept you for a PhD.
My brother went to a mid-tier school and was accepted to every school he applied (Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Berkeley, a few others) for his PhD program because he had strong research work and good recommendations.</p>

3

<p>The best path is to continue doing research (in any field is OK) and get strong letters of reference from several faculty who know you well. Publications are a big plus. Of course GPA and GRE scores must also be strong to have the most selective programs look at your application more closely.</p>

4

<p>Remember that while general school prestige is typically based on the school’s worst students (i.e. the baseline admissions selectivity), PhD programs are more concerned about the quality of the school’s best students (i.e. the ones who apply to PhD programs). Since ASU is a co-flagship of sorts, and is very large, it certainly has a significant number of best students considered to be worthy of doing PhD study.</p>